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Seriously, if you think this makes the statistics "flawed"... then you don't know anything about statistics.

Would you care to expand upon that statement at all? Are you implying that the research firm would know better and account for accidental plays or are you being sarcastic?

Let do some analysis here though:

"shows that nearly a quarter (24%) of all US music users on iOS devices in January listened to U2"

Could we get some delta on this? Is this an abnormal amount (what was it before the album release)? Does this account for the many users that just stick their iOS device on Shuffle?

"Kantar’s survey showed that nearly every iOS device user who listened to U2 in January 2015 – 95% – played at least one track from Songs Of Innocence."

Ok, so again, iOS users just set it to play U2, it will play songs from that album most likely at SOME point.

Really statistics like this would be poisoned due to the nature of how the album was pushed out to ALL users in the first place. This would be like trying to determine the number of AIDS victims in Africa by polling only the patients at an AIDS clinic, almost everyone has this album, most users can't be bothered to remove something from their lists, and most users just shuffle when they play. None of these were accounted for as far as I can tell, so why should we believe anything about this study at all?

It's more likely that Lenovo installed this software because they were paid to do so (either directly or through kickbacks to Mike Hopkins or whatever VP) and they simply didn't vet the software to make sure that it wasn't malicious. So while some people in the organization may be guilty of negligence they would never get convicted on anything close to CFAA levels.

Except you're missing the fact that Comcast already controls vast swathes of the content creation industry, if they control the markets AND the creators then they don't need to deal with the other creators because fuck them, we'll make our own shit. Of course they will still deal with the other CCs as it's a prestige thing but it gives them far too much power in bargaining with them.

Add that to being able to bully the MSOs since they're the only game in town other than broadcast (which most customers don't bother with as it's extra work they need to do) and all the merger does is strengthen the behemoth that Comcast is becoming.

You missed my point. On the gold standard yes a dollar would be worth a set amount of gold in a repository somewhere but the buying value of said dollar would still be bound to the intrinsic value of gold in general. The US government doesn't control the whole world's gold supply and if some schmuck decided to buy up 10% of the gold in the rest of the world and dump it into the ocean, the remaining 90% of the gold stocks will instantly rise in value. After this, with gold worth more, the dollar will have more buying power*, creating deflation. Boom, relatively easy currency manipulation and certainly well within the capabilities of certain governments.

*buying power as an assumption that you could buy the same things with external gold.

Because thats an awesome idea, make it easy for some organization to artificially inflate the value of a currency by running ads on TV and the internet about how you should invest in some precious metal, creating fake demand.

Tying currency to a physical substance (gold) only makes it easier for outside organizations to manipulate that currency since they can play with the values and availability of stockpiles of said substance outside of your control. Granted, this can of course still occur with an abstract currency (dollar) but its a lot harder to do so.

No instead it deflates/inflates in wild fluctuations with little or no warning or reason. Thats the mark of a true currency, never being able to instill confidence that it's going to be worth X tomorrow, even within a reasonable range.

I'd rather my currency not change in value more an investment in penny stocks. Maybe it will smooth out once the final blocks are mined out but I won't be holding my breath.

I keep reading posts on here talking about how god damned expensive RD-RAM was in the early 2000s and I just don't seem to remember it ALWAYS being that expensive, especially in summer '02. The first computer I ever built for myself using my high school grad money cost me $800, had a 2GHz P4 Northwood, and 512MB PC800 RD-RAM (in 2x256MB config no less), and I can even remember the RAM not being the most expensive part of that build (that was the CPU and the $150 graphics card I put in there).
Now maybe I just happened to find a fantastic deal, or maybe some people arent remembering correctly, and yes, I do remember the price of RD-RAM tripling not a year later, but it wasn't always so bad. I always attributed the price increase to a drop off in production to absolutely nothing as everyone jumped off of the P4/RD-RAM ship.
Best part is that that computer is still chugging away nicely at my Dad's house, still using the original motherboard, CPU, and those same 256MB RD-RAM sticks.